Quotes About Morality

Let every man consider virtue as what devolves on himself. He may not yield the performance of it even to his teacher.

What is a good man? A teacher of a bad man. What is a bad man? A good man's charge?

Health, learning and virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honour.

Virtue needs a director and guide. Vice can be learned even without a teacher.

How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?

Terror is an emanation of virtue.

But there's also an upside-down sort of happiness, a black happiness, that comes from doing evil to others.

Il compromesso è considerato come una mancanza di integrità, di dirittura morale, di consistenza, di onestà. Il compromesso puzza, è disonesto. Non nel mio vocabolario. Nel mio mondo, la parola compromesso è sinonimo di vita. E dove c'è vita ci sono compromessi. Il contrario di compromesso non è integrità e nemmeno idealismo e nemmeno determinazione o devozione. Il contrario di compromesso è fanatismo.

Justice without compassion isn't justice; it's an abattoir.

Hur ska man förhålla sig till människor som knappast är något annat än utropstecken på två ben? Hur ska man stoppa dem som inte skyr några medel?

Jag skulle aldrig slåss för ett extra sovrum åt nationen. Jag skulle aldrig slåss för heliga platser eller heliga sevärdheter. Jag skulle aldrig slåss för så kallade nationella intressen. Men jag skulle slåss för liv och frihet och ingenting annat, slåss av bara helvete.

This war is being fought between fanatics convinced that their ends sanctify all means, and everyone else - all those who hold that life is an end and not a means. It is a struggle between people who believe that justice, whatever that term may mean to them, is more important than life, and those who maintain that life takes precedence over other values.

try not to sleep with our sister's husbands

The neighborhood drug dealer kicks out his wife. He moves in a girlfriend and the wife finds out. The wife lets herself back into the house and steals a hundred thousand dollars that the drug dealer can't report missing. The drug dealer's wife goes to India, where she sends her husband a cable: The people here are poor so I gave them all your money.

But then again a good person doesn't cheat, doesn't fuck around for sport. Good and bad, though, aren't mutually exclusive are they? At least she didn't, Laney rationalizes, at least she didn't pretend that what she had with John, with any of the men, was more than it was. Didn't fool herself into thinking she had any jurisdiction over their freedom. That the fucking had anything to do with

Desperation, not desire, is the root of atrocity.

If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?

You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who's saved? Who's not?

You don't care what people think. You don't see your beloved's faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don't mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally--that's the worst, I think, deficient morals. (Saving Fish From Drowning)

I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.

Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.

J'ai été bon quelquefois. Je ne m'en félicite pas. J'ai été mé- chant souvent; je ne m'en repens pas," writes Gauguin.

My mother won't live any longer in the house of a person capable of writing such a "dirty" book as my study of Lawrence.

Les Frontières Humaines[by Ribemont-Dessaigne] came and I looked at the jacket and I do not read it. It looks too good. I am saving it for a rainy day, a day of despair, when one wants to eat his fellow man. I love the looks of it. I believe in it before reading a page.